EWA Reporting Fellowship

Late last summer, Luis decided to attend Wilbur Wright College, one of the seven two-year community colleges that make up the City Colleges of Chicago. He received financial aid to cover tuition and books. We’re not using Luis’ last name at his request to retain some privacy online.

Luis hopes to eventually get a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and said he’s motivated by the idea of earning enough that he doesn’t have to worry about money. His mom works 12-hour days to support their large family.

The solar-powered air purification tower rises 200 feet out of a cluster of high-rises in China — a soaring symbol of new possibilities for its inventor, University of Minnesota engineering professor David Pui.

Collaboration with China has long been a linchpin of U research, and lately that work has accelerated. In the past five years, university faculty have published more than 4,300 scientific papers jointly with colleagues in China — more than any other country.

If you graduate from the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy and go on to college, there is no escaping Katherine Grow. She’ll call, she’ll email, and she’ll show up on campus. And usually, during those campus visits, she’ll ask to see your phone.

The cell phones are a gateway to the college grades of the Detroit charter school’s graduates, and looking in is a key way that Grow monitors how those students are faring.

The findings are startling: Roughly one in 10 metro Louisville residents ages 16 to 24 is “disconnected” from society.

That’s 16,800 young adults who aren’t working. Nor are they in school.

The consequences for failing to reengage these young people are staggering: If these disconnected youths do not join the greater Louisville workforce, the cost burden to society over their lifetimes — from lost tax revenues to an increased dependency on social welfare programs — could exceed $15 billion, researchers estimate.

But still, despite excelling in her other classes, Marqell McClendon has struggled in the remedial math class she’s taking during her first semester at Michigan State University.

It’s an unfamiliar scene for McClendon, the valedictorian of her graduating class at Detroit’s Cody High School who’s used to students coming to her for help. Now, the tables are turned. She describes it as “bittersweet.”

A city of just 5,500 residents in East Texas might not be the first place people would think of when looking to pilot a program that could change the college landscape, but it’s happening in Rusk.

When the Rusk promise launched in 2014, it was the first community promise initiative in the state. In just five years, the results already are creating change in the community.

Reddick intended to pick up where his mother had left off. He could already envision the “Black Excellence” student group he would found at Rutgers-Newark before launching a career in community organizing and politics — just like his hero, Cory Booker. If he were elected, he’d get the lead out of the city’s water and make sure every student attends an excellent school. He believed his own success would set straight all the people he’d seen scoff at Newark. And he wasn’t afraid to voice his grand ambitions: “I want to become part of Newark’s history.”

FAYETTEVILLE, Tenn. — Farris Beasley stands in a barn on his 600-acre farm, pointing out equipment both ancient and modern and longing for the days when all of it was as easy to repair as his 1939 John Deere tractor.

Like Beasley, a retired large-animal veterinarian, farmers nationwide are hard-pressed these days to find mechanics trained to maintain their 21st-century equipment or workers who understand the complexities of modern farming or how to tend to cows or horses.

Kris Tugman loved college.

After enrolling with the first class of Tennessee Promise students in 2015, he soaked up lessons from ancient philosophers like Plato and picked up tips on camera work that supported his dream of working in the entertainment industry.

Tugman’s enthusiasm for Nashville State Community College is so intense that it’s disorienting to hear that he didn’t finish. Instead, he said, he dropped out of school to take care of his sick mother.

At Helena College, a 26-year-old student raising her daughter alone schedules class around her job at a grocery store. Stephanie Heitman’s paychecks were going toward unpaid medical bills until her small college helped with a grant.

When Tristin Bullshoe landed at the University of Montana after growing up in Browning, he struggled to pursue his dream of being a doctor. He landed in a college lecture hall with 300 people after graduating high school with a class of 12, and the Blackfeet student faced culture shock.

Sharon Braat is glad she’s going to college in the Netherlands and not the U.S.

It’s not just the nearly-free tuition her country offers. It’s the practical and hands-on classes aimed at her career. In her case, it also includes real work for actual businesses while in school.

“Our system is better for preparing you for where you want to go,” she said. “You feel like you’re in a company… If you screw up, you can screw up big time. It’s the real world.” 

U.S. public education is rooted in the belief by early American leaders that the most important knowledge to impart to young people is what it means to be a citizen. If America is experiencing a civic crisis now, as many say it is, schools may well be failing at that job.

In North Carolina, where minority students make up 52 percent of the traditional public school body, 80 percent of teachers are white. For students of color, especially black and Hispanic boys, that means they may seldom – or never – have a teacher who looks like them during their kindergarten through 12th grade years.

Inside this high school at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, teenagers are immersed in a project with the potential to temper the divisiveness that is consuming U.S. politics. They’re learning to have calm, balanced conversations about controversial issues.

How do you make the midterm elections come alive, especially for students who already feel disenfranchised? That was the challenge faced by Chelsea Ann Hittel, a social studies teacher at the Heather Ridge School, an alternative middle and high school in Frederick County, Md. Most of her students attend the school because they didn’t succeed in a regular high school curriculum; many are on individualized education programs. “The curriculum for government is very dry and unengaging, honestly. Kids come into government already hating it. They think it’s going to be boring,” Hittel said.

The midterm elections can be easy to overlook from a curriculum perspective. They’re not as frenzied as presidential elections. Voter turnout tends to go down.

A little more than a third of 18- and 19-year-olds who participated in an online survey by the Education Week Research Center in September said they had never taken a stand-alone civics class. Yet students who took those courses were more likely to say they plan to vote. Just a quarter of people who have never taken a stand-alone civics class plan to vote. Nearly twice as many do not, said Holly Kurtz, the research center’s director. T